As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant's hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back. From a report: In a livestreamed segment of the company's weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and announced new measures to fight voter suppression and misinformation -- although they amount to things that other social media platforms like Twitter have already enacted and enforced in more aggressive ways. At the heart of the policy changes is an admission that the company will continue to allow politicians and public figures to disseminate hate speech that does, in fact, violate the Facebook's own guidelines -- but it will add a label to denote they're remaining on the platform because of their "newsworthy" nature. It's a watered down version of the more muscular stance that Twitter has taken to limit the ability of its network to amplify hate speech or statements that incite violence. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks came days of advertisers -- most recently Unilever and Verizon -- announced that they're going to pull their money from Facebook as part the #StopHateforProfit campaign organized by civil rights groups.

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House Democrats approved a bill to admit Washington, DC, as a state on Friday, marking the first time either chamber of Congress has advanced a DC statehood measure. From a report: The bill, introduced by DC's nonvoting House member, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, would shrink the federal capital to a small area encompassing the White House, Capitol building, Supreme Court, and other federal buildings along the National Mall. The rest of the city would become the 51st state, named the Washington, Douglass Commonwealth after abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The bill passed with a vote of 232-180. Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota was the only Democrat to join Republicans in voting against it. Independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan also voted no. The bill would grant DC two senators and make the existing sole House representative a voting member. It is unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-held Senate, however, and the White House said (PDF) this week that President Donald Trump would veto the bill if it came to his desk. Proponents of making DC a state also point to the area's large population, which surpasses the populations of Wyoming and Vermont. As of June 2019, DC had more than 705,000 residents, according to estimates from the US Census Bureau. To become law, the bill's supporters argue it would only have to pass both chambers of Congress with a simple majority and then be signed by the President. They say the legislation's strategy of resizing the capital area would sidestep constitutional questions about making the rest of DC a state. But Republicans who oppose DC statehood maintain that adding the district as a state would require a constitutional amendment.

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An anonymous reader shares a column: Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought "Lol." Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need all of Windows Vista? In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0. "Every Windows and OS X app will be re-built for the browser!" I thought. Outlook > Gmail. Excel > Sheets. Finder > Dropbox. Photoshop > Figma. Terminal > Repl.it. All of your files would be accessible by whoever you wanted, wherever you wanted, all the time. It was obvious. Revolutionary. I haven't installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!). Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software. Docs and Sheets haven't changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can't easily interact with a Sheets API (I've tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF! Even though I have an iPhone and a MacBook, I've been married to Google services. I browse Chrome. I use Gmail. I get directions and lookup restaurants on Maps. I'm a YouTube addict. Yet I've been ungluing myself from Google so far this year. Not because of Google-is-reading-my-emails-and-tracking-every-keystroke reasons, but because I like other software so much more that it's worth switching. At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. [...] I've given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people. The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone's default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I'm never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don't have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. DuckDuckGo's privacy is an added bonus.

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Spokesperson of Tatmadaw, Myanmar's official military, said the leaking of sensitive information about military operations and positions was one of the primary reasons for an internet ban in parts of Arakan State that entered its second year over the weekend. From a report: The secretary of the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, was speaking at a news conference in Nay Pyi Taw on June 23. "Military information such as which military column is moving from what location to which area is uploaded on social media," he explained. "And there is some information that makes people in the country and abroad misunderstand the Tatmadaw. So, we have to shut down the internet in the region for security reasons." Zaw Min Tun described the internet embargo as also intended to put a stop to the dissemination of extremist rhetoric, hate speech and misleading information, saying the Tatmadaw had no plan as yet to recommend a lifting of the ban to the government. June 21 marked the one-year anniversary of the internet blackout, imposed in seven Arakan State townships and Chin State's Paletwa Township.

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Microsoft is removing the ability for business users to defer manually Windows 10 feature updates using Windows Update settings starting with the Windows 10 2004/May Update. Microsoft seemingly made this change public with a change in its Windows 10 2004 for IT Pros documentation on June 23. From a report: Microsoft officials say this change is happening in the name of reducing confusion. Here's the explanation from the Microsoft page (which I saw thanks to WindowsTimes.com), and which I had heard about from a reader last week. (Last week, I assumed this was a bug, but now it seems like it's actually a "feature.") "Last year, we changed update installation policies for Windows 10 to only target devices running a feature update version that is nearing the end of service. As a result, many devices are only updating once a year. To enable all devices to make the most of this policy change, and to prevent confusion, we have removed deferrals from the Windows Update settings Advanced Options page starting on Windows 10, version 2004."

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Founded by Instagram and finance alums, Karat wants to be the black card in every influencerâ(TM)s wallet. From a report: Spencer Donnelly, who goes by TheRussianBadger on YouTube, has cultivated an audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers for his gaming videos. For years, business has been rosy. YouTube shares a percentage of the ad revenue on each of his videos, and the money is good enough that playing videogames on camera has become a full-time job. A few years ago, he even incorporated The Russian Badger, legitimizing his YouTubing business. The only problem: No bank would give him a serious credit card. "Imagine that you're making $2 or $3 million a year and they're capping you at $20,000 a month," says Donnelly, which was the best he could get from a traditional bank. Donnelly, like many of the creators who make their living on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, has long felt shunned by institutions that don't understand that his lifestyle is also his business. That makes him the target market for Karat, a new startup offering financial services to the influencer set. Karat's first product is the Karat Black Card, designed specifically for influencers, with credit lines starting at $50,000. Its perks can be customized (gamers get cash back on streaming services; beauty influencers get perks for product purchases), and the credit limits are determined by an influencer's social metrics, revenue streams, and cash in hand. To issue the cards, Karat has partnered with the payments company Stripe, which launched its own corporate card late last year. For now, Karat wants to be the flashy card in every influencer's wallet. But eventually, the startup could become a one-stop shop for a creator's business needs. Before its official launch, Karat piloted the black card with a small group of successful creators like Donnelly, many with similar stories of financial frustration.

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This may be the last I write about Trump. Suppose Trump were a brilliant political strategist. On hearing of how awful the virus was, in January, he would have thought to himself, "I just won re-election." How could that be you ask? Simple. He waits a bit until it's obvious to the press that it's an emergency then he gives a big Oval Office speech announcing the emergency and what we're going to do. It's exaclty what the CDC says to do. "This is going to hurt," Trump reads off the teleprompter, "but we'll get through it together." Then guess where his approval rating would be? 95%. Because that's how it works. We rally behind the leader in a time of crisis, even a douchebag like Trump. Who is more dumb than a sack of nails. I'm sure one of his advisors saw this as a political gift. All Trump had to do was listen.

According to a recently published research paper [PDF] co-authored by researchers from Drexel, NYU, and the University of Washington, Tor users make high-quality contributions to Wikipedia. And, when they are blocked, as doctoral candidate Chau Tran, the lead author describes, "the collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible." From a blog post: The authors of the paper include Chau Tran (NYU), Kaylea Champion (UW & CDSC), Andrea Forte (Drexel), Benjamin Mako Hill (UW & CDSC), and Rachel Greenstadt (NYU). The paper was published at the 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy between May 18 and 20. By examining more than 11,000 Wikipedia edits made by Tor users able to bypass Wikipedia's Tor ban between 2007 and 2018, the research team found that Tor users made similar quality edits to those of IP editors, who are non-logged-in users identified by their IP addresses, and first-time editors. The paper notes that Tor users, on average, contributed higher-quality changes to articles than non-logged-in IP editors. The study also finds that Tor-based editors are more likely than other users to focus on topics that may be considered controversial, such as politics, technology, and religion. Related research implies Tor users are quite similar to other internet users, and Tor users frequently visit websites in the Alexa top one million. The new study findings make clear how anonymous users are raising the bar on community discussions and how valuable anonymity is to avoid self-censorship. Anonymity and privacy can help protect users from consequences that may prevent them from interacting with the Wikipedia community.

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Braintrust query: I'm looking for a good Node package for posting to WordPress and updating posts. Really simple stuff. A basic Hello World app in JavaScript. Any pointers much appreciated.

In response to the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act proposed by three Republican senators, Big Tech companies have registered their opposition through their Reform Government Surveillance coalition. From a report: They said that building encryption backdoors would jeopardize the sensitive data of billions of users and "leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries." They also pointed out that as the pandemic has forced everyone to rely on the internet "in critical ways," digital security is paramount and strong encryption is the way forward. The coalition's members are Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, Verizon Media, Dropbox, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The coalition was established in December 2013, a few months after documents about the United States' PRISM data collection program were leaked.

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In a presentation at its developer conference this week, Apple announced that the upcoming versions of its iOS and macOS operating systems will support the ability to handle encrypted DNS communications. From a report: Apple said that iOS 14 and macOS 11, set to be released this fall, will support both the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) protocols. Normal DNS (Domain Name System) traffic takes place in clear text and has been used by internet service providers and others to track users in the past, usually to create profiles to sell to online advertisers. But DoH and DoT allow a desktop, phone, or individual app to make DNS queries and receive DNS responses in an encrypted format, a feature that prevents third-parties and malicious threat actors from tracking a user's DNS queries and inferring the target's web traffic destinations and patterns.

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John J. Mooney, an inventor of the catalytic converter, the small and ubiquitous device that makes the engines that power everything from cars to lawn mowers less polluting and more fuel efficient, died on June 16 at his home in Wyckoff, N.J. He was 90. From a report: The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Elizabeth Mooney Convery said. Mr. Mooney was a high school graduate working as a clerk at a gas company when his colleagues encouraged him to pursue a college education. After earning a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, he went on to receive 17 patents during his 43-year career with the Englehard Corporation in Iselin, N.J. (now the Catalyst Division of the German chemical manufacturer BASF). Among them was the three-way catalytic converter, which has been described by the Society of Automotive Engineers as among the 10 most important innovations in the history of the automobile. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that tailpipe emissions from the newest passenger cars, sport utility vehicles, trucks and buses generate about 99 percent less smog-producing exhaust and soot than those from the 1970 models did.

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In hindsight, it would have been smart if instead of starting the Space Force, the US had started the Health Force.

My bet is that none of NBA, MLB, NFL or NHL have a season of any kind this year. The shit is about to hit the fan, not a second wave, but a second order wave.

Microsoft has announced it will permanently close all of its physical retail stores and transfer most of its resources to online channels. From a report: This comes after the computing giant shuttered the outlets in late March due to the COVID-19 crisis. In what Microsoft is touting as a "new approach to retail," the company said its retail store employees will be transitioned to its corporate hubs and will provide customers remote sales, training, and support. The company will focus its efforts on existing digital stores on Microsoft.com and through Windows and Xbox, which have a collective reach of 1.2 billion people globally. Microsoft added that the closures will result in a pre-tax charge of around $450 million, which it said consists mostly of asset write-offs and impairments. The Seattle-based tech titan debuted its first physical retail experience back in 1999 at the Sony-owned Metreon shopping complex in San Francisco, though that closed around a decade later. Microsoft's first real foray into brick-and-mortar retail was in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2009. This grew to around a hundred similar outlets across the U.S., including its New York flagship, which opened in 2015. The company later went international, opening seven retail stores in Canada, one in Australia, and one in the U.K.

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